A Dragon's Eastern Paradise Chapter 1 (Patreon)

1884, Japan

The first thing to die was the sound of the cicadas. Summer had clung stubbornly to the mountains that year, even as the calendars in the cities below declared the age of Meiji well underway. Heat lay over the forest like a damp cloth, and the sun burned white in a far too-bright sky. Yet around the old shrine, the air was… hesitant. As if the land itself were holding its breath.

The last Hakurei shrine maiden stood on the engawa and watched the treeline.

She was not old, not really. The white and red of her robes had not yet faded, her hair was still long and dark, tied back with practiced ease. But there were deep, unwavering lines at the corners of her eyes, etched not by age, but by the strain of holding back things the new era refused to believe in.

The ofuda on the eaves fluttered without wind. The gohei in her hand twitched against her fingers, reacting to something she did not yet name aloud.

“Mom?” The girl’s voice pulled her back. She turned.

Her daughter was small, barefoot on the worn wooden floorboards, clutching a broom that was nearly as tall as she was. The sleeves of her tiny red-and-white outfit were rolled sloppily, and there was a streak of dust on her cheek.

Somewhere inside the shrine, a forgotten bell chimed once, low and mournful.

“Yes?” The shrine maiden asked gently.

The child hesitated, eyes flicking past her to the forest again. “The kappa at the stream… they’re gone.”

The shrine maiden’s fingers tightened around the gohei.

“Gone?”

The girl nodded, cheeks puffing slightly in the way children did when trying not to look scared. “Yesterday they were there. They splashed me. Today I brought cucumbers like you said and—” Her little hand raised, mimicking something rising… and then fading. “No one answered when I called.”

The cicadas were truly silent now. Even the birds seemed to have retreated.

The Hakurei shrine maiden exhaled slowly. She’d known, of course. For months now, rumors had trickled up the mountain from the villages: the old god of the crossroads hadn’t answered prayers, the guardian wolf of the west ridge had simply stopped howling, shrine festivals below were being replaced with Western-style parades. There had been that telegram an onmyoji acquaintance had shown her, hands shaking, a report from some foreign priest of the Church about a “sudden drop in aberrant phenomena in rural Honshu.”

The modern world was learning new words: Industrialization, Civilized. Rational. Productive. Efficient. It had no vocabulary for the terror in the night.

“Mom?” The girl pressed, voice smaller now. “Did they… go somewhere?”

The elder Hakurei looked at her child. Brown eyes. Clear, uncertain, too bright with a faith that did not yet know what it meant to be disappointed.

She knelt, placing the gohei gently beside her, and reached out to wipe the dust from her daughter’s cheek with her thumb.

“They’re not gone,” She lied, because mothers were allowed that much mercy. “They’re… being pulled away. The world is changing, and the ones who live off stories are being starved.”

“Starved?” The child’s hands tightened around the broom. “Can’t we feed them? Like with the kappa? I can bring more cucumbers—”

“It’s not that kind of hunger.” Her gaze drifted past her daughter’s shoulder, across the courtyard to the torii that framed the sky. Beyond the gate, in the distant haze, she could just make out the faint suggestion of smoke rising from the valley, trains, factories, new roads cutting through old forests.

“They eat fear, you know,” the shrine maiden said softly. “And faith. The way we breathe.”

“People still get scared,” the girl protested. “Old man Tsuchida down the path still says there’s a ghost in his outhouse.”

“Yes. Some fear remains.” She smiled faintly. “But they give it new names now. Disease. Delusion. Bad air. They bring doctors and laws and textbooks, not offerings. They close shrines and say it is ‘progress.’” The word tasted bitter.

Her daughter looked down at her feet, toes curling on the wood. “So… what happens to the ones that can’t eat anymore?”

The shrine maiden could feel them already, on the edges of her awareness. Faint shapes, hollowed by neglect. A headless rider whose story had fallen out of fashion. A rain-bringing dragon forgotten in the age of water pumps. Old demons who had terrified villages for generations, now reduced to dreamlike smudges around abandoned torii.

“They die,” she said quietly. “Or go mad.”

The girl swallowed. “Can’t we stop it?”

There it was, the question that had been a weight inside her chest for years, given an innocent voice.

The shrine maiden looked away, to the edge of the engawa where shadow met light. The boundary. It hummed under her skin like a second heartbeat.

“I’ve been trying,” she admitted. “But the world is… bigger than this mountain. Bigger than this shrine, bigger than me. The faith that once belonged to a thousand small gods is being gathered into a few, and the rest are being forgotten.”

“To the… One on the cross?” the girl asked, recalling vague talk in the village.

“Among others,” the shrine maiden said, lips thinning. “And to ideas like Nation. Emperor. And progress. They have their own gods now, even if they don’t call them that.”

She stood, the knees of her hakama whispering against the floor. “But we still have one thing,” She added, more to herself than to the girl.

“Really, Mom?” The child peered up at her. “What is it?”

The shrine maiden opened her eyes fully, looking at the invisible seam that ran down the middle of the courtyard, dividing sunlight from shade, reality from the possibility of something else.

“Hope.” She murmured.

It was then that the wooden floor creaked softly behind them.

“Talking to yourself again, Hakurei?” A lazy voice drawled. “It’s a bad habit. Soon you’ll start answering.”

The child flinched, spinning around. “Aunty Yukari!”

The space at the corner of the veranda peeled open like a curtain. A yawn was heard and from it drifted a woman in an elaborate dress and parasol, lying sideways as if lounging on an invisible couch.

Long blond hair spilled like sunlight over her shoulders, and her eyes, golden, full of amusement, took everything in at once.

She closed the gap between them, with a snap of her fingers.

“Really, it’s impolite to ignore your guests,” Yukari Yakumo chided lightly, letting her parasol rest against her shoulder as she floated to the floor. Her gaze slid to the girl. “Although I suppose it’s rude to eavesdrop on such serious talk as well…”

The child puffed her cheeks. “I wasn’t eavesdropping! I live here!”

“Mm. Details.” Yukari smiled, then turned her attention fully to the shrine maiden. “So. The kappa disappeared?”

“Today,” the Hakurei answered. “The lesser river dragons two weeks ago. The mountain god at the third ridge hasn’t answered for months.”

Yukari’s eyes narrowed a fraction, the lazy affectation dimming. “Faster than we hoped.”

‘Faster than you said it would.’ The shrine maiden thought, but she didn’t say it aloud. It wouldn’t change anything.

The wind shifted, bringing with it the faint scent of coal smoke from the valley.

“Have you decided?” Yukari asked.

The elder Hakurei looked at her daughter, then back at the torii and at the landscape. “Yes,” She said.

The girl looked between them, confusion morphing into unease. “Decided… what?”

Yukari tilted her head, curiosity mingling with a strange, sad fondness. “Did you tell her?”

“Not yet,” The shrine maiden said.

“Tell me what?” the girl demanded.

The shrine maiden stepped closer and sank to one knee again, bringing herself to her daughter’s eye level. The gohei leaned forgotten against the pillar.

“There is a place,” she said, slowly. “A place that is not here, and not… there.” Her hand gestured vaguely, toward the distant human world. “Somewhere between. A gap.”

“Like Aunty Yukari’s?” the girl asked, glancing at the youkai of boundaries.

Yukari chuckled. “Not exactly like mine, little one. What I open are doors. What your mother is talking about is… a room.”

“A closed land,” The shrine maiden said. “A sealed garden. A world for those that the outside world is trying to kill.”

The girl frowned. “A world for the kappa? And the mountain god? And the others?”

“And more,” Yukari said, gaze lifting to the mountains beyond. “All those who were born from fear and faith. Tales that refuse to die, even when no one is left to tell them. Gods who accept that the era no longer has a place for them under open sky.”

The child’s hands tightened until her knuckles whitened. “You’re going to… send them away?”

“We are going to save them,” The shrine maiden corrected, though her own voice shook faintly. “If they stay, they will die or go mad. If they go to this… garden, they can continue. Even if the outside forgets.”

The girl opened her mouth, then stopped. Her lips closed, eyes wide. “Are we…?”

The shrine maiden closed her eyes.

There were other options, in theory. She could stay. She could let the world rip the old things out, one by one, with cold, rational cruelty. She could continue to be the last of the line that held back the ones that refused to fade gracefully, until she, too, was forgotten somewhere between a footnote in a village chronicle and a superstition in an exorcist’s manual.

But this shrine had never simply been a wall. It had always been a bridge. Bridges went with what they connected.

She opened her eyes again and met her daughter’s gaze head-on. “The garden must have an anchor,” she said. “A place. A name. A family. Someone must stand at the edge of that sealed land to keep it closed… and open, in the proper way.”

Realization dawned in those brown eyes, fragile as spun glass. “You mean…” Her voice wobbled. “We’re going too.”

Yukari looked away, for once, giving them the courtesy of privacy. The parasol tipped, casting her face into partial shadow.

“Yes,” The shrine maiden whispered, every syllable a nail hammered into inevitability. “We are.”

For a long moment, the only sound was the faint creak of the shrine’s old bones settling.

Finally, the girl scrubbed at her face with the back of her sleeve. “If we go,” she said, trying to sound brave, “will the kappa be there?”

“Yes.”

“And the mountain god?”

“If he chooses to come.”

“And the… the raven that lives in the furnace? The one who eats bad prayers?”

The shrine maiden blinked. “…Probably.”

The child took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and nodded once, sharply, as if accepting some childish chore. “Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll go too.”

The shrine maiden’s chest ached. She wanted to say “No. Stay. Live in the sun. Grow up in a world that does not know what it owes to your blood,” but the words would not come. The Hakurei line was not just a role, not just a duty; it was a knot in the fabric of reality. Leave it unattended in one place, and it would unravel somewhere else.

“I’m sorry,” She said instead, and pulled her daughter into a tight embrace.

The girl buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. “Will… will Dad be there?”

The shrine maiden’s arms tightened further. “He…” Her voice faltered. The memory of a man in a faded haori, smiling wryly under the eaves, flickered. Then the memory of a grave under a crooked pine. “He’ll be waiting, somewhere else. But not there. Not with us.”

The girl was quiet for a few heartbeats. “…Then we’ll make sure he’s not lonely,” She whispered. “We’ll keep everyone else alive, so he isn’t the only one missing.”

Yukari’s eyes softened. “You really are your mother.” She murmured.

A distant roll of thunder echoed, though the sky above the shrine remained unmarred blue.

“Are the preparations ready?” The shrine maiden asked, standing again, her hand never leaving her daughter’s shoulder.

Yukari nodded, and with a flick of her wrist, tore open a gap.

Beyond the violet tear, there was not darkness. Not exactly.

A vast, swirling expanse stretched out, colorless and full of motion—a storm of light and shadow without ground or sky. In the distance, something massive and crimson undulated like a dragon the size of continents, slipping between currents of unreality. It never truly came into focus; it was more of an idea than a creature, a wound in the concept of stability.

The girl’s breath hitched. “What is that?”

“The Gap,” Yukari said calmly. “The space between worlds. The dimensional void.”

Her smile thinned. “And that is one of the things that claims it as home. I already talked with him and had to get his permission, he said we could do as we want just that we don’t interrupt his fun.”

The crimson colossus opened an eye that might have been a sun and might have been an abyss, glancing lazily in their direction. For an instant, the shrine trembled, and every boundary in existence seemed to shout.

Then it looked away again.

“Dragons,” Yukari said lightly. “Always so dramatic.”

The shrine maiden swallowed, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling. “You’re sure,” she said, “that what we build there will be… stable?”

“As stable as anything can be in an era that insists on forgetting what made it possible,” Yukari replied. “We’ll anchor it to rules.” She tilted her head. “You are the only one who can do this, you know.”

“I know,” The shrine maiden said.

Her grip on her daughter’s shoulder firmed. “And you’re sure they’ll follow?”

Yukari’s smile became something sharper, older. “They already are.”

She snapped her fingers and the air shifted.

All at once, the shrine thrummed with presence.

The girl gasped, clutching at her mother’s sleeve. Shapes were emerging from the treeline, half-seen things, their edges blurring between real and imagined.

A horned silhouette with a gourd at its hip, grinning drunkenly through a haze of forgotten festival nights.

A towering tengu with wings of paper charms, ink-streaks dripping from his eyes.

A radiant woman wreathed in light, her outline flickering with every phantom prayer that had once been offered at her altars.

Others followed, shadows of dreams and nightmares, half-starved, drawn by the pull of the Hakurei boundary like drifting moths to a last bonfire.

They gathered at the edge of the courtyard, hesitant. Their bodies wavered, as if a strong breeze might scatter them like smoke.

The shrine maiden stepped forward, daughter at her side. “You have all felt it,” She said, as if continuing a conversation that had started years ago. Her voice rang clearer than before, buoyed by something older than the mountains. “The air is thinning. The way your names are spoken less and less, replaced by words that do not taste like belief.”

Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Some looked away, ashamed. Others glared toward the valley, toward the faint hiss of steam and the distant clatter of industry.

“You can stay,” The shrine maiden continued. “Wait. Wither. Rage. Fade.” She lifted her chin. “Or you can cross the boundary. One last time.”

She gestured toward the gap that still at the edge of the courtyard.

“A realm between worlds.” she said. “A land cut off from the flow of this era. Somewhere where stories will not be uprooted like weeds because they do not match the textbooks. Somewhere where you will not have to beg for scraps of fear from villagers who have been told not to believe in you.”

The radiant woman with the harvest aura stepped forward, face pale. “And what will it cost us?” she demanded. “No god gives a gift like that for free.”

The shrine maiden met her gaze without flinching.

“Everything costs something,” she said. “You will lose the outside. The sun of this world. The chance to ever stand as you did before, under a sky where ships cross oceans and newspapers print your names in riddles.”

She looked over her shoulder, beyond the gap, to the roiling void.

“You will live in a closed world. Gensokyo, a Land of Illusions. You will be bound by new rules. You will no longer be free to drown a village because someone forgot to leave rice at your altar.”

A low, bitter laugh rolled through the assembled. “So we go from fading gods,” The tengu said, “to old stories stuck in a box.”

“Yes,” The shrine maiden said simply. “But you will live.”

Silence fell.

Then, unexpectedly, a small voice piped up. “And we’ll live with you,” The girl said, stepping forward, wiping her eyes with the back of her sleeve. “We won’t leave you alone. You’ll have a home. And… and festivals. And someone to bother you about rules.”

A few of the gathered youkai blinked. One of the lesser oni snorted. Someone actually chuckled.

The radiant woman’s shoulders relaxed by a fraction. “You would… cut yourselves off as well? For our sake?”

“To keep the barrier in balance,” The shrine maiden corrected her gently. “If you go alone, the boundary will twist. You need an axis. A point around which it can form.”

She placed a hand on her daughter’s head, fingers threading through the dark hair.

“We are that axis,” she said. “The Hakurei exist to stand where humans and youkai meet. If we take that meeting point elsewhere… Perhaps a new equilibrium can form.”

Yukari clapped her hands softly, once. “Well said,” she murmured. “And time is almost up, my dears. The outside world doesn’t stop for our speeches.”

She lifted her parasol, and more gaps opened—small ones, at the edges of the clearing, in the forest, over the river, even above a half-collapsed shrine in a village far below. They glowed softly, like lanterns lit in a suffocating fog.

—---------------------------

Across Japan, other beings of fear and faith felt the pull.

A forgotten serpent god, coiled around the foundation stone of a bridge, lifted its head.

A household spirit, long banished to the attic as the family adopted Western furniture, peeked out from under the eaves.

An old nightmare that had once haunted feudal battlefields stirred in the shrapnel-laden mud near an army training ground.

They all heard it. A call. A choice. Come. Or die here. One by one, they moved.

—-------------------------

At the Hakurei shrine, the first to step forward was the horned drinker. He swung his gourd once, for old times’ sake, then sauntered toward the gap with a lopsided grin. “Well,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat to the shrine maiden. “A new party is a new party. Can’t let all the good fun go to waste just because humans got boring.”

He vanished into the violet seam.

Others followed. The tengu. The goddess. A dozen lesser nightmares. Spirits whose names had never been written down but had echoed in lullabies and curses for generations.

Some hesitated at the threshold, feeling the wild, raw wrongness of the void beyond. The red dragon silhouette flickered in the distance again, immense and indifferent, a reminder of the scale of what they were attempting.

—------------------------------

The courtyard felt suddenly, painfully empty. The cicadas did not return.

The shrine maiden stood alone with her daughter and the youkai of boundaries.

“It’s time,” Yukari said softly.

The girl swallowed, hand finding her mother’s and clinging like a lifeline. “Will it hurt?” she whispered.

“A little,” her mother said honestly. “Crossing big boundaries always does. But it will be quick.”

Together, they stepped toward the main gap. For a moment, the shrine maiden glanced back.

The old buildings. The worn stone steps. The weathered torii, under which generations had passed with offerings and prayers and curses. The mountains, stretching down to the valley where the smoke of factories rose and trains shrieked along new-laid tracks.

“Goodbye,” She murmured, to a world that would not remember her name. Then she crossed.

The sensation was like being turned inside out and back again, threaded through a needle that did not exist in any direction a human mind recognized.

The girl cried out once, but her mother’s grip did not falter.

The howling chaos of the Dimensional Gap rushed around them, full of currents that could have shredded civilizations. The great red dragon turned its head again, interested for half a heartbeat, then dismissed them as beneath its notice.

Around them, the gathered youkai clung to their own identities like rafts.

Yukari moved like a conductor, parasol carving arcs in the formlessness. Each sweep drew a line. Each line became a rule. A boundary between sky and ground, between human and youkai, between inside and outside.

The shrine maiden added her will to it, pushing, anchoring, shaping.

The gods around them then started to help as land coalesced under their feet.

Mountains rose, echoing but not identical to those they’d left behind. A sky formed overhead, a closed dome lit by a sun that borrowed its light from memory. Rivers cut through valleys that had never existed.

At the center of it all, on a familiar-but-new slope, a shrine took shape—rebuilt from the essence of the old one but subtly different, tuned not to the outside world’s veins but to the fragile, newborn logic of this pocket.

When it was done, they stood on solid ground again.

The girl staggered, then blinked, looking around in wonder. “It worked,” she breathed. “We’re…” She trailed off.

The air felt different here. Thicker, as if every breath pulled not just oxygen but something into the lungs. The gathered youkai and gods around them were no longer flickering shadows, they were solid, vibrant, their colors too bright, their presences too sharp, their smiles edged with something fierce and relieved.

Far off, the faint shimmer of a boundary marked the edge of this new land, where a curtain of un-reality pressed against the fragile walls.

“Welcome,” Yukari said, spreading her arms theatrically. “To Gensokyo.”

The name rolled out and settled over the land like a spell. The Land of Illusions. A Safe haven for things that no longer had a place under the open sky of the mortal world.

The shrine maiden exhaled, feeling the new axis settle around her bones. Her connection to the outside world dimmed to the faintest thread. In its place, ties to a hundred hungry, grateful presences wrapped themselves around her soul.

She glanced at her daughter, who was staring at the rebuilt shrine with wide eyes.

“Does this mean,” the girl asked hesitantly, “that when I grow up, I’ll be… the shrine maiden of here?”

“Yes,” Her mother said, and felt the boundary thrum in agreement.

The girl stared for another moment, then squared her shoulders again. “Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll make sure everyone behaves. And that we have festivals. And that no one gets lonely. Even if the outside forgets us.”

Yukari laughed softly. “You’ll have your hands full.”

“That’s fine,” the girl muttered. “Somebody has to.”

The shrine maiden looked up at the closed sky of Gensokyo, then beyond it, imagining the swirling void and the distant, uncaring dragon.

Far, far beyond that, the old world continued to turn. Trains would still run. Factories would still burn coal. Children would still grow up without ever seeing a monster under their bed.

They would live and die never knowing how much emptier their nights had become.

But here, in this sealed garden in the middle of the Dimensional Gap, fear and faith would not be allowed to wither quietly.

The boundary had moved but their story would not end.

—-------------------------------------

Kuoh Park, 1997

The park was hot and dusty, cicadas screaming in the trees. A six year old Issei stood in front of the swings, fists clenched, facing a boy a head taller than him who was holding Issei’s favorite red hero card just out of reach.

“Give it back!” Issei shouted.

“Make me, Hyoudou,” The older boy sneered. “What, gonna cry?”

Issei wanted to say something cool. Something like the protagonists on TV. Instead, what came out was, “You’re a jerk! That’s my limited-edition card!”

The older kid laughed and shoved him. Issei stumbled and hit the dirt, palms scraping, eyes stinging, not from tears, obviously, just because there was dust.

He was about to lunge again when a blur of orange hair and black shorts crashed into the older boy from the side.

“Don’t pick on him!” The newcomer yelled.

A fist was swung and the older boy doubled over, clutching his stomach, the card fluttering from his hand.

Issei blinked from the ground.

The one who had appeared was a kid like him, short orange hair in a messy bob, T-shirt with a hero emblem on it, and the most intense purple eyes he’d ever seen. She grabbed the card mid-air, then turned, grinning wide.

“Here,” She said, holding it out. “You dropped this.”

Issei stared. “…You punched him.”

“He was being a bully,” She said matter-of-factly. “Heroes punch bullies.”

Something in Issei’s chest lit up. “You like heroes?” He blurted.

Her grin got even bigger. “Yeah! I’m gonna be one when I grow up.”

“That’s my dream!” He shouted back, eyes sparkling. “I’m gonna be a hero who protects everyone!”

They stood there for a second, equally fired up, equally oblivious to the older boy limping away, muttering curses.

“…I’m Hyoudou Issei,” He said finally, dusting himself off and trying to look cool. “You can call me Issei.”

“Irina,” She said proudly. “Irina Shidou.”

“Let’s play heroes,” He said immediately. “You can be the sword saint, and I’ll be the dragon knight!”

Her eyes shone. “Deal!”

From that day on, Irina was there almost every afternoon. They ran around with sticks as swords, shouting attack names, saving imaginary villages from monsters only they could see.

Irina laughed easily, got angry quickly, and never hesitated to tackle someone twice her size if they were being unfair. When Issei fell, she was the first to offer a hand. When she tripped and scraped her knees, she’d hiss through her teeth and let him put a dorky “healing spell” bandage on.

“You’re so dumb,” she’d say, cheeks pink. “That spell doesn’t even mean anything.”

“It does if I say it does,” Issei replied, puffing up. “I’m the hero, remember?”

She’d roll her eyes and look away, but she never moved her leg until he was done bandaging.

She told herself the way her heart thumped in those moments was just because he was embarrassing. 

—------------------------------------

Outskirts of Kuoh, 1998

One year later. 

Issei was walking around the forest surrounding Kuoh as he went outside to collect bugs. He was following a beetle through the grass, until he lost sight of it, and then looked up to find himself at the base of a long stone staircase.

The shrine at the top was old but neat, the grounds swept, the air a little cooler than the rest of town. Wind chimes tinkled under the eaves.

He was about to leave when a girl’s voice floated toward him. “Um… can I help you?”

Issei turned to find the girl as she stood in the doorway of the shrine building, hands tucked nervously into the long sleeves of a blue and white outfit that looked kinda like priest clothes from TV. Her hair was bright green—actually green, not just dyed at the tips or pulled into a side ponytail. A tiny frog hair clip bounced near her temple.

She looked like she’d stepped out of a picture book.

“I… uh…” Issei realized he’d been staring and flailed. “I was chasing a beetle.” It sounded very stupid out loud.

The girl blinked. Then a small, shy smile tugged at her lips. “A beetle?”

“Yeah. It was huge,” He insisted, because beetles were serious business. “It went somewhere over here, but… uh… I guess I got lost.”

“You’re at Moriya Shrine,” she said, taking a few steps closer. “I’m Sanae. My family takes care of it.”

“I’m Issei,” he said. “Hyoudou Issei. Sorry if I’m trespassing.”

“It’s okay,” She hurried to say, hands waving. “Really. We… don’t get many visitors, so…” The last part came out quiet.

Issei shifted his weight, suddenly noticing how still the place was. No people. No stone foxes like at other shrines, either. Just the main building, the worn torii, and a donation box that looked like it hadn’t seen many coins.

“Your shrine’s pretty,” He said honestly.

Sanae’s cheeks turned the faintest pink. “Th-thank you. Do you… want to come up? I can show you the view from the back. It’s really nice.”

He hesitated for half a second, then nodded. “Sure!”

They walked around the building to a little hill behind it. From there, they could see the whole town: rooftops, tiny people, the school, the park where Irina waited, all framed by blue sky.

“Wow,” Issei breathed.

“Right?” Sanae said softly, eyes bright as she watched him more than the scenery. “Sometimes I come here and pretend I’m in the sky. Like… on top of a really high mountain, with a lake of clouds below. Where gods live.”

“You know gods?” He asked, impressed.

“My family… serves them.” She hugged her sleeves closer. “Well. We’re supposed to. Mom says we used to help a great wind goddess and a snake god far away, but… things changed. So we came here instead.”

“That’s so cool,” he said instantly. “Do they have, like, super powers?”

Sanae smiled, a little sad. “I don’t know yet. But I’ll find out. I’m going to be a shrine maiden just like Mom. I’ll talk to gods and help people and…” She trailed off, glancing at him. “And I’ll make this shrine famous again.”

“I bet you will,” Issei said, without thinking.

She blinked. “You… think so?”

“Yeah!” He grinned, hands on his hips. “You’re already working so hard. And it’s pretty here. And if anyone says this shrine is lame, I’ll punch them.”

“That’s violent!” She yelped.

“For justice,” He said.

She giggled. It bubbled out of her before she could stop it. “You sound like Irina. She was shouting about dragons at school earlier.”

“Oh, you know Iri too?” He said, lighting up.

“She’s loud,” Sanae noted.

“Yeah.” Issei’s grin softened. “He’s really fun.”

Sanae looked at his profile for a moment, watching how his eyes went distant, thinking about his other friend. Something tight and warm curled in her chest.

“Um,” she said, before she could lose her nerve. “If… if you want… you can come help sometimes? With sweeping. Or… or I can tell you stories about gods and youkai. They’re sort of like heroes too.”

“Really?” Issei said, turning back toward her. “That sounds awesome!”

Her heart skipped. “O-okay,” She said, clinging to her sleeves again so he wouldn’t see her fingers tremble. “Then… it’s a promise.”

After that, Issei came up often. Sometimes with Irina, sometimes alone. He swept leaves, cleaned the stone steps, and listened with wide eyes as Sanae shyly recited old myths she’d learned from her mother.

He liked the ones about wind and miracles best. She liked the way he listened like everything she said mattered.

When he smiled at her after a long afternoon of work and said, “It’s starting to feel livelier here,” Sanae Kochiya realized that somewhere between teaching him to clap properly at the altar and laughing at his clumsy attempts to bow, she’d started wanting things.

That more days like this continued and for him to keep looking at her with that honest, uncomplicated smile forever.

—------------------------------------

Kouh Elementary 1999, One year later

Issei, Irina and Sanae were now eight years old and for the first time the trio was in the same class. Much to the frustration of the teacher as Issei and Irina usually got into trouble with Sanae usually having to control and help the two out. 

But that would all change as one day in their class, a transfer student with short brown hair cut in a bob, star-patterned hair clip, thick glasses that she pushed up with one finger whenever she spoke. Her uniform was neat, but her notebook was covered in doodles of magic circles and caped figures.

“I’m Usami Sumireko,” She said during introductions, standing at the front of the classroom. “I like stuff about the occult, urban legends, and ESP.”

A few kids giggled and joked at her mentioning the occult with the teacher frowned faintly as she felt a new headache coming.

‘So cool!’ Issei on the other hand was struck with awe.

—------------------------

Later after class, while other kids quizzed her about where she’d moved from, Issei approached as she was carefully packing her odd notebooks away.

“You like urban legends?” He asked.

She looked up, surprised. Most people led with “Is that stuff real?” or “So you believe in ghosts, huh?” Not… that.

“Yes,” she said cautiously. “I investigate them. Why?”

“Do you know any good ones?” He asked, eyes bright.

She blinked again, then smiled slowly. “Maybe,” she said. “Why? Are you scared?”

“Nah,” he said. “I’ve got my friends watching my back.”

Irina, who’d sidled up behind him, snorted. “Just don’t drag us into your ghost hunts?”

“I would never,” Sumireko said, absolutely lying. “Well. Maybe. The moment we moved here. I already investigated several places in town that are said to be full of ghosts and I am going to find them.”

Sanae, clutching her schoolbag to her chest, hovered a little behind them, curious and wary. “Is it really okay to mess around with that kind of thing?” she muttered. “What if we get cursed?”

“Exactly. That’s why it’s fun.” Sumireko answered with her eyes gleaming. 

Issei looked between them, grinning. “Let’s all go together,” he suggested. “If something spooky happens, Iri and I can fight it, Sanae can excorise it, and Sumireko can… do her ESP thing.”

“What ESP thing?” She demanded, flustered. “It’s not like I can just, like, use telekinesis or open doors to other worlds on command or something.” Irina hooked an arm around Issei’s neck. “If anything tries to haunt you, I’ll beat it up!”

Sanae fidgeted. “That’s… not how exorcism works…”

Sumireko watched them banter, something twisting inside her. He’d just… included her. No disbelief. No mocking. The group then headed out on the lookout to find ghosts in several places that unfortunately ended with them finding nothing and getting yelled at by an old man for being in his house. They had a ton of fun though.

—----------------------------------

The next day, 

The group sat across from each other at lunch, watching Issei gesture wildly as he told Irina and Sanae about a TV show.

“And then the hero used his secret power to punch through dimensions!” He said, punching the air.

“You can’t punch dimensions,” Sanae protested weakly.

“You don’t know that,” Sumireko said, automatic.

Issei laughed, turning to her. “See? Sumireko gets it.”

The way he said it, like it was obvious she’d understand, made something fizz in her chest.

She found herself talking more when he was around, telling them stories about submerged towns that reappeared under certain moons, ghosts in school bathrooms, a rumor about “a land of illusions” hidden somewhere no one could reach.

“Sounds cool,” Issei said, eyes shining. “Let’s go there someday.”

“You can’t just go to a land of illusions,” Sanae insisted, flustered. “It’s not that simple.”

“It is in the stories,” Sumireko countered.

“In stories, sure,” Irina said. “In real life you’d probably just get in trouble and miss dinner.”

Sumireko looked at Issei. “Would you still want to go,” she asked impulsively, “if it meant leaving everything else behind? Like… Earth, school, all this?”

He blinked at her, then scratched his cheek, thinking harder than he usually did for hypothetical questions. “…I dunno,” he said honestly. “I like my parents. And playing here. And… you guys.” His gaze slid over each of them. “If I went somewhere weird, I’d want everyone to come too.”

Sanae looked down, cheeks pink. Irina crossed her arms, making a face to hide her blush.

Sumireko pushed her glasses up to hide her own. “…Idiot,” She muttered, but there was no heat in it.

—---------------------------------

It was subtle, at first.

Irina noticed that when she and Issei played heroes, she liked it best when they were “married warriors” from the future who’d sworn to protect the Earth together. She always felt weird when other girls from class tried to join their games, a prickling jealousy she didn’t have a name for yet.

“He’s my partner,” She said once, too sharply, when one of them tried to take the “dragon knight” role. “We always fight together.”

Issei, oblivious, just laughed. “We can all be on the same team, right?”

Irina sulked the whole afternoon and didn’t know why.

—----------------------------

Sanae realized something was wrong the day she caught herself rehearsing greetings before Issei came up the stairs.

“Welcome, Issei,” She whispered to herself behind the shrine, clutching her broom. “Thank you for coming. I’m glad you’re here. No, that’s weird. Um. Oh, you came again! I mean, of course you did—no—”

She jumped when he called, “Sanae? You here?”

Her heart did a gymnastics routine. “C-coming!” She squeaked, nearly tripping on her own feet as she ran around the corner.

Later, when he helped her hang new prayer plaques. 

“Being here makes me feel calm,” Issei said with a smile.

She went to bed that night staring at the ceiling, thinking vaguely treasonous things about gods and prayers and how maybe, just maybe, there was someone else she wanted to devote herself to.

—--------------------------

Sumireko found herself writing “Hyoudou Issei” absentmindedly in the margins of her occult notes. Surrounded by magic circles and equations about latent psychic potential, his name looked utterly mundane. Infuriatingly so.

“It’s not like that,” She muttered to herself, erasing it. “He just… doesn’t laugh when I talk about weird stuff. That’s all. That doesn’t mean anything.”

The next day, when a group of boys snickered at her for reading a book on dreams during recess, Issei wandered over and plopped down beside her without a word, chewing on a melon bread.

“What’re you reading today?” He asked, leaning closer to look at the cover.

She instinctively turned the book toward him so he could see.

“Lucid dreaming,” she said. “Controlling your dreams.”

“That sounds awesome,” he said immediately. “Does that mean you can control yourself while dreaming to be able to fly?”

She blinked. “Sometimes.”

“Teach me,” He demanded as he scooted closer to her and listened to every single thing she said. And that, unfortunately, made her heart do a thing too.

Done. Tell me what you think and if I made any mistakes. This commission was brought to you by Deus Ex Mima. So be sure to thank him.